(OK, on the last one, since it's an interesting topic: What I find interesting is how little overlap there is between people who are FB friends, people who read the blog, people who look at my Flickr photos, and people who follow me on Twitter. There is overlap, but I'd say the majority of FB friends I have who are friends or acquaintances in real life are folks who never, ever read the blog. Even when I set up the blog to ping Twitter when I post, which is then cross-posted to my FB wall, only a small number of my FB friends will actually click the link to read the blog post.

I have a pet theory -- a hypothesis, really -- no, even weaker than that, let's call it a "conjecture" -- that maybe Mark Zuckerberg thinks that privacy doesn't really matter because, for 99% of human interactions, nobody cares. Here's an example: except for maybe three or four people, none of the folks I'm FB friends with by knowing them from work has ever seen me outside of The Store, so they've never once seen me not wearing my work uniform. Of all those, only one has looked at my photos there and said, "Wow, you wear overalls a lot!" The only FB friends I have that read the blog are folks who I met online, or, oddly enough, people I knew from high school or a couple of college friends, and even they don't comment on it all that much. I've pushed my own personal envelope quite a bit on what I figured I could post that might cause someone to comment or ask "Hey, what's that about?", and I've come to conclude that unless you get way out there into "Too Much Information Land", people just aren't that interested. Or they're not that bothered by it, or their reaction is to note it and move on without comment.

So, it seems to me that my online life, spread basically across four main areas -- Byzantium's Shores, my Flickr photos, Facebook and Twitter -- tends to auto-compartmentalize itself, without much help from me. The areas where I get the most reaction or comment are the blog and FB; I've always been a little bummed that my Flickr photos don't get much comment at all, and my Twitter activity is probably a little too sporadic to really become reliable. But in general I find that I can occasionally post about things that I otherwise was once reticent to post about because I can, after years of doing this, be fairly confident that there's not going to be much reaction at all.

None of which is to say that I'm comfortable about posting everything, because I'm not. There is a great deal of personal stuff in my life that will never, I promise you, get posted here. And I think that's how it should be.

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"Make your country...into a land that understands more than only war and righteous piety. Allow space in your lives for more than battle chants to inspire soldiers. Teach your people to...understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music."

-Guy Gavriel Kay,The Lions of Al-Rassan

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any creative art. The water is free. So drink.Drink and be filled up.

Stephen King,On Writing

We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.